four cups of coffee

Sometimes, particularly when I've had a cup of coffee prior, I get excited in class.

Excitement, unfortunately, doesn't correlate very well with coherence. We were talking in Ethics about the Niebuhr brothers and critiques of pacifism. Reinhold critiques most forms of Christian pacifism as being little more than humanistic optimism, and advocates instead a realistic amassing of power to counter other power centers in global politics.

(Something like that- I've now had four cups of coffee, so my thinking is faster than my typing. Good for the thinking, not so good for the clarity of writing.)

Anyway, I heard something or other about balance of powers and my caffeinated mind said 'Dahrendorf!' Then, because I am ever-so-embodied, my mouth followed suit, leading the class to ask me what the connection was between the ongoing discussion and my animated citation of a British sociologist of whom no one else had heard.

Enter incoherence: "well, he wrote Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, and he's roughly contemporary with Niebuhr, and he was interested in how power is divided and diffused among groups so that, um, oligarchies... yeah, so that the power doesn't get centralized... which is sort of what Neibuhr is saying. So they're connected...?"

I have a bookshelf in my house. It's not big enough to hold my books, so they sit in stacks two deep. They aren't organized, either, just thrown in out of boxes from when I moved over the summer. I've tried a bit to put the books I don't expect to use toward the back, but it's a subjective process that sounds like this:
Hm, Acts of Faith, I might want a little rational choice analysis of religion, I'll put that toward the front... yeah.
I don't do well at anticipating which books I'll want on a whim, though, so of course Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society was buried under a stack in the back.

Enter motivation, though: I drug it out. No clue when I'll look back through it, but it's in my backpack waiting. The connection is clearer to me now than it was in class- I really like our buddy Reinhold, and his critique of active Christian pacifism makes sense to me. It would make more sense, though, if he were writing from a secular position... in which case he would more or less be Dahrendorf.

And I do like Dahrendorf. And coffee.